Many people lack a factual understanding of events in our region because the media report them inadequately. We blog here because our daughter Malki, murdered at the age of 15 in a restaurant massacre in Jerusalem, was a victim of jihadist hatred and barbarism. For jihadism and terrorism to end in Israel, New York, Madrid, London and everywhere else, people first need to understand the scale on which it is happening and why. This ongoing war is killing us.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

10-Aug-14: When it comes to Israeli lives and Israeli deaths, Israelis will make their own decisions. Could it be otherwise?

Israel's friends in the Seattle, Washington, branch of the
Jewish Voice for Peace [Image Source]

The war that almost all Israelis wish were at an end is still raging as of tonight (Saturday night) in Gaza and in those Israeli communities within range of the Hamas rockets and tunnels. Hamas' well publicized and blood-curdling termination of the 72 hour cease fire on Friday morning committed it to more lethal attacks on Israel and still more push back from the IDF.

Shmuel Rosner, an astute observer whose writing we have long admired, is a Contributing Op-Ed writer at the New York Times, as well as being the political editor at The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and a fellow at The Jewish People Policy Institute. The op ed below is carried in Friday's paper edition of the International New York Times where we first saw it, as well as on page A23 of the August 8, 2014 edition of the New York edition of the NY Times.

TEL AVIV — The Israeli song “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” is a curious tune. “I
have no other country,” go the lyrics, “even if my land is on fire.” It’s hard to find a Jewish
Israeli who doesn’t identify with it. Lefty Israelis interpret it as a protest
song. It was sung at demonstrations against the 1982 Lebanon War and vigils
following the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Israelis on
the right interpret it as a patriotic song about attachment to the land; they
sang it after terrorist attacks and during the 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.I was reminded of the song in
recent days as I read a string of articles by smart, savvy, knowledgeable,
non-Israeli Jews, who say that the brutal war in Gaza has made them question
their Zionism. What unites these writers, of
course, is that all of them do have another country. And that’s why, when push
comes to shove, the Israeli government doesn’t - and shouldn’t - listen to
them. These writers aren’t all cut
from the same cloth, but their arguments are similar. There’s a heart-warming
side to their articles; they are all clearly concerned about Israel. “I care
about Israel personally, rather than abstractly,” the American journalist Ezra
Klein wrote in Vox. On the other hand, they are
disappointed, sometimes horrified, by an Israel for which they still care, but
not as much as they used to. Roger Cohen, writing in these pages, argued that current Israeli policies are
a “betrayal of the Zionism in which I still believe.” Their conclusions are
also similar: They are “less sympathetic” to Israel than before, as Jonathan Chait put it in New York
magazine.

As a group, they are a shining
example of a phenomenon that Atlantic Monthly and Haaretz columnist Peter
Beinart has popularized: the distancing of liberal Jews from Israel, especially
in the United States. The core of Mr. Beinart’s argument is that
“particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish
liberals are Zionists” because of Israel’s hawkish policies. It’s a shaky
theory, and experts still argue about the scope of the trend. But there’s no
doubt that many liberal Jews feel uncomfortable with Israel. Mr. Beinart,
citing the criticisms of the wildly popular Jewish comedian Jon Stewart, argued
last week that if “Israel continues to elect governments hostile to a viable
Palestinian state - the American mood will incrementally shift.”

This is a bleak prediction,
because support from America is a cornerstone of Israel’s security. If Jewish
liberals aim to erode that support, they should remember that Israel has
managed in the past to make do, even with weakened American support. But I
assume their motivation is different. Sometimes it feels as if liberal Zionist
critics are trying to ensure that Israel’s deeds do not rub off on them. At
other times, it feels as if they’re trying to clear their conscience of
something for which they feel partially responsible. They seem to believe that the
implied threat that Israel might lose Jewish supporters abroad will somehow
convince the government to alter its policies. This is a self-aggrandizing
fantasy and reveals a poor grasp of the way Israel operates. To put it bluntly:
These Jews are very important, but not nearly important enough to make Israelis
pursue policies that put Israeli lives at risk.

Let me be clear: I believe
Israel’s relations with Jews around the world are crucially important. Indeed,
I’ve devoted a great deal of my career to thinking and writing about this
topic. I often find myself preaching to Israelis about the need to be more
considerate of more liberal Jewish views on issues ranging from religious
conversion to women’s prayer at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. But I would never
expect Israelis to gamble on our security and our lives for the sake of
accommodating the political sensitivities of people who live far away.

Of course, not all Israeli
policies are smart, and it’s not imperative that all Jews agree with them.
Israelis are susceptible to persuasion. But using the threat of eroding Jewish
support as a scare tactic stands in the way of effective persuasion. Israelis, like most people,
prefer to take advice from those they believe have their best interests at
heart.

But is that really the case here?

If all Jews are a family, it
would be natural for Israelis to expect the unconditional love of their
non-Israeli Jewish kin. If Jews aren’t a family, and their support can be
withdrawn, then Israelis have no reason to pay special attention to the
complaints of non-Israeli Jews. Moreover, the threat of liberal
Jews distancing themselves from Israel is a hollow one. Jews of other
nationalities are the proud and patriotic citizens of other countries, and they
are free to make the decision to detach themselves from the greatest Jewish
enterprise of the last two millenniums.

But they aren’t like baseball
fans who move from New York to Boston and, with great difficulty, stop rooting
for the Yankees and learn to cheer for the Red Sox. If they still want to root
for a Jewish state, there’s no substitute for Israel. If they believe there is
a need for Jewish sovereignty, Israel is the only option available to them.
Like in that song, there is no other country even if the land is on fire.

Clearly, these critics of
Israel’s behavior believe that Israelis themselves would be safer if the
country adopted their prescribed liberal policies. That might be true, but it
makes no difference. On matters of life and death,
war and peace, Israelis are going to make their own decisions. If they lose the
support of some liberal Jews over it, that would be regrettable, but so be it.Israel will have to learn to
survive without that support, and I’m certain it will.

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THIS ONGOING WAR is not part of the activity of the Malki Foundation which was founded by us, Frimet and Arnold Roth of Jerusalem, on September 9, 2001. But it is inspired by the same tragic circumstances. The Malki Foundation (also known by its Hebrew name: Keren Malki) is a memorial to the life of our daughter, Malki. She's in the photo below this paragraph. Malki was murdered at the age of 15 in a massacre in the centre of Jerusalem carried out by Hamas.

Beyond its function as a remembrance of a beautiful life, the foundation provides tangible, concrete, invaluable support daily to several thousand Israeli families from every part of the religious and socio-economic spectrum: Christian, Moslem, Jewish, Druze and others who care at home for a seriously disabled child.

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This Ongoing War: About this blog

Many people lack a factual understanding of events in our region because the media often report them inadequately. Our daughter Malki, murdered at the age of 15 in a restaurant massacre in Jerusalem, was a victim of jihadist hatred and barbarism. For jihadism and terrorism to end in Israel, in New York, in Madrid, in London and everywhere else, people first need to understand the scale on which it is happening. This ongoing war is killing us.